FORUM

Translation and the "Meme"1

Hans J. Vermeer Heidelberg, Germany

The following remarks may perhaps provide some new points of view for the translator's work as well as the relationship between target and source texts. I am offering some ideas about ideas (memes about memes) as put forward by various authors in the last decade or so. A few of their possible implications for Translation Studies will be taken up in another article (Vermeer forthcom­ing). A suitable basis for the following considerations seems to have been supplied by recent work on evolutionary biology and philosophy (cf. Riedl and Delpos 1996) and brain physiology and psychology (cf., e.g., Damasio 1994; Calvin and Ojemann 1995; Crick 1994).

Definitions

According to Dawkins, a "meme" is a

unit of information residing in a brain (Cloak's 'i-culture'). The 'size' or range of memes may vary. Their types as well (e.g. an idea, a habit, a lecture). They may be perceived by the sense organs of other individuals, and they may so imprint themselves on the brains of the receiving individuals so that a copy (not necessarily exact) of the original meme is graven in the receiving brain. (1982: 109)2

I understand Dawkins' definition as referring to material brain configurations as well as their non-material "contents". Delius (1989: 46) on the other hand defines memes as the "material configurations in neural memory that code behavioural cultural traits". Dawkins' broader definition seems to be less precise but more "fruitful". For further specifications see Ball (1984: 147 and 154).

Target 9:1 (1997), 155-166. DOI 10.1075/target.9.1.10ver ISSN 0924-1884 / E-ISSN 1569-9986 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Anything is potentially informative. Anything that is considered (as­sumed/believed) to be (and not only potentially) informative may be called a meme or part of a meme or a set of memes or a supermeme etc. In any case, from the point of view of these definitions or descriptions a non-material "in-between" is needed to spread memes. (As for the necessity of material connectors compare written texts, sound waves etc.)

Memes and Meta-Memes

Scholars have pointed out a logical(?) difficulty related to memes. Consider the following: given a meme M (for example, the perpetuum mobile) which is found out to be "bad" ("don't try this, it doesn't work"; Ball 1984: 154), we then need a second meme M' "remember that M is bad". Analogously, if we have a meme N considered to be "bad", but which turns out to be usable ("good"), we need a meme N' to enable us to remember that N is good.3 In principle we would need a remembrance meme for each meme. Do we need a (re-)remembrance meme for each remembrance meme in order to make it recoverable? Will this lead to an infinite regression? (It won't in practice.) But anyway, according to this line of thinking each meme has a "meta-meme" as a sort of "remembrance meme" (and each remembrance meme a meta-meta-meme?).

Meme (Re)production

Memes provide a far greater speed and flexibility to responses than genes (Bonner 1980: 196). Like "genes" (in Dawkins' sense), memes are more decisive ('important') than organisms (individuals). Organisms (and for some authors, groups of organisms) are gene and meme "vehicles".

A gene is just "there", it can "live" for millennia and it is self-copying. A meme is usually more shortlived.

Does a meme exist when its "vehicle" (in Dawkins' terminology: an individual or an individual's brain) is not (or not yet) conscious of it? (The case is simpler with a meme that is no longer conscious = consciously recoverable). Can such a meme influence the vehicle's behaviour (and then influence other vehicles and memes)? How dependent are memes on vehicles,

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and vehicles in their behaviour on memes? The last sentence of the above quotation from Dawkins (1982: 109)

suggests that memes, other than "genes" and contrary to general opinion, are not "replicators" in a strict sense of the term. (Of course this depends on the definition.) The replicators would be the recipients. But are they really "ac­tive"? Do they take over memes or do memes "introduce themselves"? (For differences between genes and memes cf. Bonner 1980: 19-21.)

If the doubtful replicator status of memes is in any way right it could mean that higher order units, such as the brain or even an individual, gain in importance in the reproduction and spreading of memes as compared to genes. Individuals would no longer be only "vehicles", but play an active role in the procedure. However, compare Dawkins' generalizing statement: "memes pro­pagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation" (1989: 192). "A replicator is anything in the universe of which copies are made", he says (Dawkins 1989: 264). From this point of view, a meme is uttered by someone in whom it originated; when it is "imitated" by someone, we can speak of it as a "replicator". It all depends on the point of view. Perhaps one can also think of pre-natal "imprinting" of babies (Janus 1996) as a possible form of meme replication.

There is yet another difference between memes and genes: "Selfish genes (and, if you allow the speculation of this chapter, memes too) have no foresight" (Dawkins 1989: 200). But the individual (the "vehicle") does (or believes he does/is made to by memes?). The individual cannot change his genes, but can(?) refuse to accept memes due to the existence of a meme of "rejection" (cf. Dawkins 1989: 331f.) which we call our belief(!) in "free will". (Such a belief "is" a meme. I admit that again this leads to an infinite regression of assumptions — which we soon break off for practical reasons.)

Is a meme only partly self-copying (when taken over unconsciously; cf. Dawkins 1989: 324)? Is it copied by someone (a recipient = vehicle) who copies it, which means that such copies are not produced automatically? They may be induced by an "educator", but is it necessary for someone (the recipient/his brain) to decide to accept them, sometimes even in form and meaning against the intention of the original producer? (Cf. plagiarism; look­ing at the number of publications which [partly] lack references I sometimes wonder if ideas are not taken over more often unconsciously than con­sciously.)

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[Memes] arise by combination of parts of some old memes in new ways with perhaps just a jot of originality (mutation). In some fields copying from the work of another is called plagiarism, copying from two or three others is called dull, but copying from many others is called research. This meme was plagiarized from a Harvard professor who wishes to remain anonymous. (Ball 1984: 148)

"[T]he only messages that matter are those that are received" (Hull 1982: 301). In cases like these memes are not copied but reproduced. On the other hand we all like to broadcast our ideas. In the beginning, language may have been a primarily social phenomenon in the sense that talking together sig­nalled social coherence. Today language is primarily informative (the social function of language still lingers in phatic communion). We are teachers by destiny. The eagerness to spread a meme (or: of a meme to be spread) together with the supermemes of modern mass media possibilities may 'explain' the development (or evolution) of a common world culture (under whose surface regional cultures continue, perhaps more alive than ever, for they are strug­gling for survival; cf. fundamentalism).

Going back to the idea of meme reproduction, memes are often like intruding good or bad parasites (Dawkins 1989: 192 and 323). Memes seem to be infectious (cf. Delius 1989: 26). We can't help being 'infected' by memes. Memes, especially those verbally framed, not only influence other brains, they can become like a 'drug' — and an incentive, too — to the originating brain itself (cf. Dennett 1991 on self-stimulation). Above I asked who or what thinks in us. Bonner suggests that memes, like genes,

are immediately selected by our brain, and those that are suicidal [for the genes? the organism?] are summarily rejected. This means that many of our customs, traditions, and even moral precepts are handled by memes as well as, if not better than, by genes. (1980: 197)

So it would be the brain (or the brain's vehicle?) that is active? Anyway, Bonner's view may be a bit too optimistic. Look at our world today. Could it not be possible that memes are leading mankind into a blind alley (like genes did, at least according to some scholars, with dinosaurs?) Lichtenthaeler remarks:

Mit Beklemmung stellt man daneben Wahrheiten fest, echte Pionierleistun-gen, die ganze Jahrzehnte brauchen, um uberhaupt erst wahrgenommen zu werden. Setzen sich Fehlinterpretationen leichter durch als richtige? Es liegt dann und wann wie ein Fluch uber der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. (1984: 286)

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Thoughts to be thought over again. Today social learning is to a great extent provided and therefore directed

by "schools" (in the broad sense of any 'upbringing' or 'educating' entity). Schools in this sense are influential culture producers. Compare also the tendency for "grouping". Cf. what Hull has to say about the selection of promising hypotheses in scientific progress: "It is this feature of science which leads the general public to view scientists as 'close-minded'" (1982: 306). Referring to a previous publication, Hull distinguishes between replicators and interactors:

Replicators are the entities that pass on their structure largely intact, interactors are those entities that bias replication because of their relative success in coping with their environments. Interactors are the entities that exhibit adaptations. (1982: 316)

Meme Structure

As for memes, there are at least two layers or levels to be distinguished (apart from the above-mentioned meta-level): the meme itself, with or without 'shape', and its verbal formulation. The latter more often than not (partly) changes the content (cf. Dennett 1991: 317; cf. compulsory language structure features). Besides, it is difficult to decide what is good and what is bad (cf. Ball 1984: 146); nothing "is". Cf. the role that Plato's ideas (= "memes"!) have played in the Western world. Obviously, there is a distinction between good and successful memes. According to Ball (1984: 150) the latter should be easy to communicate, adaptive, able to get cooperators (including Ball's "bandwagon effect"; ibid. 15If.) and to conceal bad features. (But what makes memes "successful"? What "is" successful?) There seem to be cases where instead of referring to cooperative memes, it is preferable to speak of coactive memes, because memes may co-act with each one for a different purpose (skopos) and yet behave complementarily (cf. two armies in a battlefield; memes arising out of war experiences may be "successful" [or "good"?] in the sense that they lead to improvements in more peaceful everyday life circum­stances). Notice that the above qualities need not be intentional. They need not even be active features, but must be adoptable by a recipient. Introducing a two-level meme looks like suggesting a difference between genes and memes.

Memes 'grow' by association etc. with other memes; they form 'organ-

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isms'. The more complicated an organism is, the less likely it is to suffer further evolution. Does this apply to memes too? (Compare theories.)

It would be interesting to pursue the "meme" idea a bit further (cf. Dawkins [1982: 114], who speaks of "replicators" that work on different levels of "vehicles") and use a language that does not speak of organs (like brains) or organisms (like humans). A meme can 'act' at a distance and thereby "directly benefit itself (ibid. 233). (Remember intertextuality and how it comes about.) The replication of a meme can only be done indirectly, not directly from one brain to another. "Some sort of physical intermediary is necessary" (Hull 1982: 276), e.g. via a "texteme" (in the sense of Vermeer 1990) not necessarily printed on paper but as an abstract entity (cf. also Ball 1984: 152, for "extrasomatic memes"). Some memes are not conveyed by words or symbols, but by imitation. They have "a considerable disadvantage, for [they] can only propagate inefficiently" (Ball 1984: 153) — compare the "direct method" teaching and learning; perhaps explicit rules and theories do have a "good" function and are really more "successful". A texteme can be copied (cf. Dawkins 1989: 273f.). A texteme is in a way an "extended phenotype" (Dawkins). It may be regarded as having an existence that is (relatively) independent of the brain which produced it (cf. Holz-Mânttâri 1984 about texts "in their own right"; Vermeer 1990). Ball (1984: 152) envisages a time when "memes will learn to reproduce themselves without people". He is perhaps thinking of AI computers. Is a texteme (etc.) only a "vehicle" (of memes) or more than that? It may be convenient to find another appropriate term for a "meme" graven in the receiving brain on the basis of a texteme. As I have shown elsewhere for other cases (Vermeer 1992: 44-46), there may even be the "monadic" engravement of an "imaginary meme" (invent a better term) in a recipient's brain. I am thinking of cases where a person's more or less casual and certainly not productively intended behav­iour is copied as significant by another person. Examples may include cloth­ing fashions (cf. Dawkins 1989: 192), or, if the story is true, the spreading of the uvular Ivl in imitation of a French courtier's solecism.

The Phenotypic Extension

When a meme induces other people to take it over from its inventor, it can be considered not unlike a phenotypic extension of a gene. (Cf. Bonner 1980: 24:

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"behavior is part of the phenotype"; cf. ibid. 196.) "Memes are a by-product of the genes" (Bonner 1980: 21; cf. also Dawkins 1989: 198: "Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into opposition". Cf. Delius 1989; as for the interdependence of genes and memes cf. Ball 1984: 156.)

On what does a meme exert its phenotypic effect? On an organism, the world, which of Popper's three worlds? (Probably on all three of them.) What is a human organism from the point of view of a meme? An extended phenotype of genes and memes alike? One of the most exciting ideas — for translation theory as well — concerns the fact that and the ways in which the meme exercises its influence on the brain. Brains are changed with the influx of meme "parasites". As Dennett says,

the differences in a brain whose native language is Chinese rather than English would account for huge differences in the competence of that brain, instantly recognizable in behavior. (1991: 209f.)

But let's be careful. I have often wondered if, and if so, how a given language structure (unawares) influences the speakers of that language. In English I say / gave it to him, Basque eman diot is more like "given it to-him to-me" [It became me to...?] (cf. Schwerteck 1984).

A meme, if not self-copying, cannot be passed on to the following generation by inheritance like a gene — unless we see the whole phenomenon from the point of view of a rather 'wild' imagination: A really 'good' meme 'forces' a recipient to copy it, so to speak. (We speak of a good or fertile idea etc., which does not mean that it is actually good or fertile; but who decides? a meme? — cf. Dawkins 1986: 129: "at least some of the replicators should exert power over their own future"; Dawkins is talking here of the "first replicators on Earth", but cf. Dawkins 1986: 157f.) The meme need not even be 'good', it must just meet a big enough ("dominant") set of other memes willing to 'cooperate' (cf. Dawkins 1989: 194). I believe that this is the way politicians sprout up. According to Markl (1996) memes act politically. Con­sider what Dawkins writes about genes:

If any genes of an organism, such as a human, could discover a way of spreading themselves that did not depend on the conventional sperm or egg route, they would take it and be less cooperative. (1989: 245)

Does this apply to memes too? I should like to add the following phrase just for fun:

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It is an intriguing thought that both would want the host to be sexually attractive. (Dawkins is talking of genes and parasites.) (ibid. 246)

Memes and Culturemes

There are attempts to formalize "cultural selection" (Bonner 1980: 18). Cul­ture as a system (of systems) of memes and their behaviour can affect the gene pool (ibid. 22-25); genes can affect culture (ibid. 25). (This is an important point for cultural specificity; it obviously has its direct bearing on translating and translation theory.)

Memes enable the reproduction of culturemes from one individual to another and from one generation to another. But maybe one day a computer programmed with artificial intelligence will take over... (cf. Dawkins 1986: 158; for a criticism of traditional AI see Hofstadter et al. 1995).

Generalizing the meme idea, it seems to be quite near the "cultureme" when taken from the point of view of the recipient-adopter (cf. Oksaar 1995; Vermeer and Witte 1990; Dennett 1991: 387, calls culture "the memosphere"; according to Dennett 1990 memes are part of an "infosphere"). According to Dawkins, a meme is a

unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as naturally selected by virtue of its 'phenotypic' consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment. (1982: 290. Cf. ibid. 233 and Dawkins 1989: 190.)

But notice that culturemes 'are' not culturemes, but 'become' culturemes when considered as such by a recipient. (An observer is a kind of recipient.) According to Dawkins' (1982: 188f.) line of thought, memes can be under­stood "as i f they were "striving to maximize their own survival".

There is an interesting conclusion from Dawkins' reasoning. If I put forward a theory made up of many memes, I am interested in finding out who has come up with similar memes. (The interest may be culture specific.) It does not matter so much whether and why someone else came to roughly the same conclusion as I did or whether he got (or borrowed) the theory wholesale from me. I may feel more 'attracted' to someone who shares a few important (important-for-me) memes with me than to someone who shares a greater number of memes with me which, however, I consider less decisive to my theory as a whole. My criticism will probably be harder on the second person

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than on the first. (Mind the consequences: from some possible "ethical" points of view my attitude may look arbitrary and will be disappointing. Evaluations make life complicated. But then they are "memes".) The story may be devel­oped into a novel: My "partner" may be induced to take a favourable stand towards me by my favourable attitude towards him and so on and so on. I am, of course, thinking of Dawkins' "extended phenotype", "host phenotypes", etc. [of "memes"] — or of influential connections, even in academic "upgrad-ing".

Memes and Translation Theory

Some implications from the meme concept for translation theory and practice should be obvious right away. Let me mention briefly but a few:

• There is no longer "the" text, either as a fixed unit or as a member of one well-established intertextuality (cf. the notion of "texteme"; Vermeer 1990). Memes may so to speak jump in and out of texts and groups of texts according to the actual condition (cf. Vermeer 1992: 49-54) of the "user" (or "replicator"?).

• Text reception and production in translating is determined by memes which, in their turn, seem to be only partly controllable by their "host" (the translator). (For a criticism of Bergström's "random generator" see Risku forthcoming.)

• Translating means transcultural meme replication with translations as transcultural meme vehicles (perhaps acting somewhere on the Utopian line to "perfection" as conceived by Walter Benjamin; cf. Vermeer 1996).

• Cultures can be considered "meme pools" where memes are (considered to be) interdependent.

And so forth; there are many more implications, I am sure.

To conclude, I wish someone with a double schooling would take up the meme subject in detail, writing or even rewriting, for example, a book about genes where the concept of "gene" is systematically checked to see whether or not it can be replaced by the concept of "meme" so as to find out how far the meme idea carries (cf. Hull 1982; Ball 1984), for example, for translation

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studies. Compare, for example, the "ganging up" or cloning of genes with memes in Internet. (Cf. Delius 1989.) And then history would have to be looked into, starting perhaps with Bergson's évolution créative (1907) or earlier. And then we ask again what Dawkins' selfish meme theory means for translating and translations. If we agree with the author that memes are as selfish as genes and that in the long run only "good" memes will survive (because the detrimental ones lead to the extinction of the species, in this case homo sapiens) we still have no clue to a definite answer, which would have to wait till after doomsday. But we can ask ourselves why meme A (e.g. the claim for translations "faithful" to a source text surface structure) and meme B (the dichotomic struggle between "literal" [= faithful as above] and "free" translations) have had and continue to have such a long-lived history. Maybe new memes — C and D (Holz-Mänttäri's theory of translational acting and skopos theory) — are too "dangerous" for a society too ignorant of or uninterested in translation procedures and their consequences? (And transla­tors and translation scholars are members of a society.) Whatever the answer, gene and meme theory ask us to ask: Who benefits?

The metaphor of purpose, genes and memes function as if their only purpose were to propagate and perpetuate themselves . . . leads to important insights into social behavior. (Ball 1984: 159)

According to Ball, the hypothesis is that

organisms are determined by interactions among just four things: genes, memes, the environment (including other organisms), and a random compo­nent [which Ball equates with free will, but perhaps it is more complicated than 'just' that], (ibid.)

In any case, the hypothesis gives us a manageable set for further investigation. Here is one more "meme" about memes:

Dawkins wrote about "selfish genes". Above I mentioned conflicting memes. Hofstadter et al. suggest that coherence is a stochastic phenomenon (see above). Riedl (1980; 1985) explains the schism ("Spaltung") between a world of the exact and technical sciences and the "arts" or humanities by the bipolar organisation of the human brain. Does this mean that we postulate two types of memes: cognitive-analytic and emotive-holistic ones? We would conclude that theorizing is done (mainly) by the former type. Or are there two types of theoreticians, the generalists and particularists? Where does practical translating belong? Logically a holistic approach would make use of both

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unequal "halves"; would the "praxis" agree? Do we need a third meme type or a second meta-meme (see above) which determines (the conditions for) the contribution "percentage" of each half to translating?

Author's address:

Hans J. Vermeer • Bothestraße 138 . D-69126 HEIDELBERG • Germany

Notes

1. The term is Ball's (1984: 146).

2. Cf. also Dawkins 1989: 196; Dennett 1991: 199-208 et passim. See also Hull 1982.

3. "Good" can take on several meanings in the context of these brief considerations: morally/ethically good, usable for the present purpose, having a certain case-specific value for someone.

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